Art stands out: Wheeldon, Balanchine and a Justin Peck world premiere

On Wednesday night at New York City Ballet, Kylie Manning’s impressionistic scenic designs for Christopher Wheeldon’s From You Within Me (new last season), Eamon Ore-Giron’s bold geometric backdrop for Justin Peck’s newest confection, titled Mystic Familiar, and Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s billowing man-eating cape for Balanchine’s mid-century Variations pour une porte et un soupir, pretty much stole the show.

If Mystic Familiar seemed familiar, it was because the final movement, titled ‘Ether’, looked and sounded like an homage to Twyla Tharp and Philip Glass' iconic In the Upper Room. The caffeinated ensemble in sneakers and white jumpsuits, rather like a Formula 1 pit crew, flung themselves about with the relaxed yet keen-edged precision that is Tharp’s Upper Room signature.

The episodic suite started with ‘Air’, a trippy scene in which the ensemble meandered across the stage. Clad in sky blue unitards with huge puffy sleeves of tulle that obscured their heads whenever they moved their arms, they made like clouds against Ore-Giron’s colorful abstraction of a seven-lane highway that converged on the horizon, illuminated by the rays of multiple suns.

‘Earth’ was a solo for Taylor Stanley in a thrift-shop get-up of olive green sweat shorts and a tank top with a few sad spangles. Stanley really did look confounded by the assignment, a mess of semi-angsty spiraling, hopping and to-and-fro’ing with legs and arms flung east then west. At least he got to put on a white jumpsuit and bust out some electrifying moves in the ‘Ether’ finale.

‘Fire’ was not the kind that has decimated swaths of Los Angeles County, rather another trippy concept embodied by the ensemble sporting trendy playclothes in dayglo colors. Punchy and cheerful, ‘Fire’ showcased Tiler Peck and Gilbert Bolden III in some daring overhead lifts and KJ Takahashi doing about 1,000 pirouettes (I lost count) in sneakers!

Naomi Corti and Emily Kikta made like ‘Water’ in lavender racerback leotards, shaping cool geometries in a ghostly light. One did a slow dive to the floor then the other would step over her and they did it all over again, advancing downstage like a slow motion wave.

For ‘Ether,’ composer Dan Deacon, playing electronic instruments in the pit while the orchestra did their acoustic thing, went for the full Glass effect but came up with Glass half full. The rest of the score with its Saturday-morning-PBS vibe and twee lyrics (“Close your eyes and become a mountain… Open your eyes and remain the mountain”) was a damp squib after the throbbing, dialed-up-to-eleven rock and industrial noise soundtrack of his first collaboration with Peck. The popular The Times are Racing was also a sneaker ballet but a darker, more defiant one. The tracks for that ballet had come straight off Deacon’s 2012 album ‘America,’ inspired, Deacon said, “by my frustration, fear and anger towards the country and world I live in.” I don’t know what world he is living in now but he has reportedly turned to a daily meditation practice. That may explain the mountain. The pivot to live music for this new collaboration, with an orchestral arrangement and vocals sung live by Deacon, did not rescue the work from terminal cuteness. But if it attracts new audiences to the ballet, as have a number of Peck’s other works, that would be a great thing.

Wheeldon’s work looked tremendously sophisticated in comparison, starting with the Schoenberg score. But while “Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)” traces a brooding journey from apprehension and despair to acceptance and hope, Wheeldon kept his dancers busy on a more abstract plane, save for a final moving tableau for Sara Mearns, a stalwart, introspective figure. She drifted away from the huddled ensemble and seemed to disappear into the otherworldly glow of Manning’s backdrop, a mass of swirls and slashes of color, her shimmering lilac unitard just another iridescent blob.

Brief solos, duos and trios offered some fine moments, particularly in tense and noble exchanges between Chun Wai Chan and Jovani Furlan, flecked with tender gestures. But our attention was too often divided by fragments of dance happening on different parts of the stage at once. My notes read, “There are too many people in this ballet.”

There were no people in Balanchine’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir, just a door (Miriam Miller, in a strong debut) shrouded in a massive black cloak suspended from the flies that eventually smothers the yearning, pathetic sigh (Daniel Ulbricht.) Balanchine is long gone but we are still playing out his variations on the theme of inhuman seductresses and their wretched male victims. Ulbricht hurls himself repeatedly to the ground, possibly dislocating a few discs in his spine, all for his art. Miller mercifully plays it weird, not sexy. This was indeed a bizarre program choice to sandwich between Wheeldon and Peck.